Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

If you confirm that the problem is NOT hardware, then you can try to fix your original install of Windoze. If it is hardware, resolve that and you may not lose your working environment.

Having the working environment depending on any specific piece of hardware is a violation of the "Always have an exit plan" philosophy.

My frustration with the braindead 90s design ideas of home directories in Windows NT is due to me wanting the account-specific data to be accessible from any computer, not depend on any specific workstation.

That's great in principle. In practice, people want a box that just works without ever being forced to play AD Admin (or whatever flavor you prefer) and fix something that got randomly got borked in another box before you even have your morning cuppa over skimming the most recent eMails.

Sadly, Winbloze is still the closest thing we have to "it just works" on whatever collection of junk you may have that calls itself a PC.

So... now that I've vented that frustration... 

We all eventually must bow down and pray before the altar of the god of WHAT IS... and for most people, that is the fact that most of their work environment is in one box. Yes, it's laziness, and yes there are ways to make it much more redundant... but those require either that you have somebody else to be your admin, or that you take on that role yourself and eventually wind up admin-ing something before that morning ritual, etc.

My solution is to just keep a known-good hard drive handy, so that if something goes pear-shaped, I can easily boot from something else and diag the core hardware without losing my live environment.

None of this has anything to do with the 11th Commandment; which if you don't obey, you deserve to lose all your shit. It is just the assache of restoring from backup and then discovering that won't fix it that I'm trying to avoid here.

It takes 10 minutes to do a fresh install of Winblows; 15 if you have to D/L the iso fresh. That is is a bargain as far as time spent on a diagnostic step.

mnem

[bd139]

Regarding redundancy the best option is to have two of whatever you depend on:

These are identical:

[Cerebus]

Eh, the 11th commandment, depending on who you talk to, is either "Thou shalt not take the piss" or "Thou shalt not get caught".

[mnementh]

https://wellenkino.de/hp/5253b.mp4

this 

Martin - sorry for taking so long; was busy today.  I took a quick video of the reduction gears in my plug-in:


They appear to run on what I'm guessing is a spacer held in place by the Pozidriv screw threaded into the faceplate of the cavity.  In your video, that screw seems to be moving as you poke at the gears.  Is it possible that the problem is as simple as that screw is loose?  I'd try grabbing the head with a pair of needlenose pliers to try and tighten it - see if that helps.  It looks like a PITA to get that face off without buggering everything up, but if snugging that screw up helps, it might be necessary to remove the front panel to properly tighten it.

Good luck with it!

-Pat

Something like this will allow you to get in there and tighten it.

   

This little beast has been my MVP more times than I can count over the last 20 years... 1/4" x 5/16" means it can be used with any common driver bit for drill or hand-held impact driver; the 1/4" square drive adapter comes with.

Both ends hold the bit positively and such that it bottoms out, so you can apply pressure on the bit while holding just the handle to keep it from camming out. And the ultra-fine ratchet mechanism means almost zero drag, so you can actually ratchet one-handed without having to hold the bit itself on ridiculously small stuff like m3 machine screws.

I've even cut down a bit with a grinder to get into a space as little as 12mm wide with it. 

mnem
Good hunting!

[mnementh]

Arguably the Caterham 7 is the most Lotus of any still available; Colin Chapman was a pioneer of performance through weight reduction, and the 7 weighs in at a little over half a ton, making it lighter even than a Mk1 Elise, and probably half the weight of current Lotus offerings.

They bought the design rights to the 7 in the early 1970s and have evolved the design without losing the original looks or light-weight philosophy. The one with a GSX-R engine is going to be terrifyingly fast round a track.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Colin Chapman said something along the lines of "A car needs to do three things - accelerate, stop, and change direction.  Adding horsepower helps one.  Making it lighter helps all three."  The '05 Elise has a curb weight of 1975 lbs/896 kg.  The brakes will about rip your eyeballs out - a friend of mine drove it and commented "When you step on the brake pedal, it's like the hand of God reaches down and grabs the car!"

The 7 must REALLY be a blast to drive!

-Pat

Yes, but you can do both.  I remember the Triumph Spitfire I shoehorned a Cologne 2.6/5-spd trans into; by the time I was done carving away and boxing the subframes, we'd lost 200 lbs and almost tripled the HP. Fukkin' thing sat higher in the front (actually, restored "as new" ride height) and would do wheelstands in the first two gears but it still stopped on a dime. 

mnem
"If a car doesn't go, you're walking. If it doesn't stop, you're dead." ~grand-dad

[Neomys Sapiens]

This little beast has been my MVP more times than I can count over the last 20 years... 1/4" x 5/16" means it can be used with any common driver bit for drill or hand-held impact driver; the 1/4" square drive adapter comes with.

Both ends hold the bit positively and such that it bottoms out, so you can apply pressure on the bit while holding just the handle to keep it from camming out. And the ultra-fine ratchet mechanism means almost zero drag, so you can actually ratchet one-handed without having to hold the bit itself on ridiculously small stuff like m3 machine screws.

I've even cut down a bit with a grinder to get into a space as little as 12mm wide with it. 

mnem
Good hunting!

Nice one. I have a similar one, although it seems a bit longer. Now getting it in 1/4" and 5/32" (4mm) would be a real hoot!

[Vince]

Price tag implies it's for a pack of 10 units though !  I assume you only need one ?!

That's the subtle difference between "10 Pieces" and "10 Piece". 10 Piece means you get 10 bits with it, not 10 rachets.

McBryce.

I don't understand where I went wrong here ?!

I wrote  : " A pack  of 10 units/computers " ... does that not mean that you get 10 computers ??

" a pack of 10 " doe snt mean "10 of  " ?! 

I am lost.

Also you seem to confuse the 10 piece ratchet thing. I was not talking about that, was replying to Tautech's computer.... computerS  not ratchet !   

[mnementh]

I’ve got to the point where I’m just going to buy a second hand Lenovo crate from now on. If it goes wrong I’ll just buy another one. I’m done with pissing around with hardware after that shitty Asus B560M board!

Yup. Off-lease .edu and corporate fleet model Lenovos for all my fam for over a decade now. Max out the RAM, add SSD, fresh plain vanilla install of Windoze (do NOT let it install any of the Lenovo "update/software managers") off MS servers, and you get the most uptime for least $$$ and least assache, plain & simple.

Every few years, hardware refresh and you're golden. This last clusterfuck with that asshat selling a borked touchscreen on fleaBay instead of throwing his garbage in the garbage where it belongs has me rethinking whether I should even bother to fix mine... 

mnem
 

[mnementh]

My family laugh at me because I frequently come back yet another tool, be it a set of driver bits, sockets, cutters etc, because they say haven't you got enough already, but I often get the last laugh when they bring something to fix when I say, you remember when I brought that xyz thing you laughed at me getting? Well I just used to fix this for you, without that tool I couldn't have done it. That silences them for a bit then. 

Yup. This has been the story of my life. When I was 8, I took apart every alarm clock in the house, working or not. When I was 10, I put them all back together again. And they all worked.

mnem
Scared the f*** out of grandmomma too... she spent a week swearing I'd been possessed. Until I fixed her stove... then I was allright. 

[Neomys Sapiens]

Something like this will allow you to get in there and tighten it.

Now finally Chapman has decided to offer Torx bits. Took them long enough. Two years ago they did not.

[Vince]

Price tag implies it's for a pack of 10 units though !  I assume you only need one ?!

That's the subtle difference between "10 Pieces" and "10 Piece". 10 Piece means you get 10 bits with it, not 10 rachets.

McBryce.

The French have always had a problem with plurals. 

English: Man, men.
German: Mann, Männer.
French: Homme, hommes.

In only one of those languages is one of those pairs of words pronounced the same, despite being written differently. You can't tell if the Frenchman is talking singular or plural unless you also get the define article as well: l'homme, les hommes (or "les hommes, eh" if it's Canadian French).

When I was initially learning French we were being taught to read, write and speak at the same time. I was constantly tripping up over the fact that the written plural was, for the most part, formed just like an English one but not pronounced.

Well I beg to disagree ! 

There are plenty of words in French where the plural form differs from the singular form !

- [egg] Un oeuf / des oeufs (NOT pronouced the same)
- [horse]  Un cheval / des chevaux

 etc.

ALSO... in English you say (normally)  " a 10 year old kid (for example) "    NOT a 10 yearSSS old kid ", that had me baffled at first ! 

ALSO you  have words that are are SPELT the same but that are not SPOKEN the same and don't mean the same thing : LEAD for example !!   

OK, in French we can do it too -->  " FILS " either means a son(s), or wires (plural). Pronunciations is different depending on intended meaning...

BUT if you mean it as "son", then it's even SIMPLER than in English, because then the plural and singular form are written and spoken the same ! 
Granted... English can do that too at times, like "Aircraft", you don't say " AircraftS" normally.

So it's not like you were all right and we were all wrong ! 

Why not just say that languages are all quirky in one way or another, that it's what makes them interesting and that we should celebrate it rather than complain about it ?! 
I sure would not want all the quirkiness of the French language to go away, don't want to speak or write like a C compiler or something !

[mnementh]

AutoCAD certainly doesn’t. If you’re using commercial CAD software, buy commercial workstation with a Quadro card in it  .

About the only thing it makes sense for is if you want to squeeze an extra 10fps out of Cyberpunk 2077 or have specific compute requirements which require memory bandwidth.

The computers we have, even the ass end ones, are absolutely shit hot boxes of lightning these days.

EDIT:

Yeah... we truly are in the age of "good enough" computing. We had a similar phase around the middle of XP's life cycle; like then, it will take a quantum jump in "what we expect from a PC" before we really need any more. MS, bless their peeweeny little hearts, tried to give us that with their take on VR, but they were a bit too far ahead of the curve. Another few years tho... we may be ready.

I've run some fairly large (~2GB saved locally) models in Frustion360 on my Lenovo Flex 3/1580 ( i7 6500U/16GB RAM/SATA3 SSD) and it chugs along pretty damned well, even driving my 32"/1440P monitor. Not as effortless as my 1440P gaming rig, but hell... I have like $320 in it and 2 good years of service already before the touchscreen got smashed.

mnem
 

[med6753]

Today's project. This 7A24 has a minor issue on channel 1 where the trace goes into intermittent bouncing a few minor divisions and then stop and perhaps a few minutes later start all over again. It passes signal OK but the bounce can become annoying. So let's track down the source. This plug-in uses custom Tek die and I discovered so does the 7A26 plug-in and the 485 scope. I have both a junker 7A26 and 485. I checked the 7A26 and it's an older unit and the P/N of the IC's is different. If I had a later S/N they would be identical. I still have to check the 485.



Anyway, the test set up. Cover off the 7904 and the 7A24. It's a little awkward getting in there but workable. As I stated the bounce is intermittent and it took a while but I've pretty much nailed it down to U1550. See schematic. So I'll change that IC. I have to pull down the junker 485 and see if it has the same P/N IC. Like the 7A26 it is S/N dependent. If it's an older S/N and the wrong P/N there are a bunch of beat to crap and somewhat cheap 7A24's on Ebay. But I'll have to ask the seller the S/N first before ordering. 

[cyclin_al]

...they will have to pull down millions of homes and rebuild them to give each household the means of charging their EV vehicles...

Why do you think they're already chasing private vehicles from bigger towns and cities in Europe? 

Ralf

Yes, I'm well aware that the big squeeze has already begun, it has over here as well. To see if I'm right or not, we shall have to wait and see what happens. Governments have had "U" turns before.  Most people are totally unaware that E5 fuel is being replaced in the main part by E10 fuel in the UK this summer, which is suitable for many cars pre 2002 vintage, which will still have to use E5. A car that cannot use E10 fuel will be forced to use E5 and it will cost most motorists with 50Litre tank around £15 extra to refill their tanks each time.

I'm all with BD and Cerebus here -- there is scant need for private motoring in urban areas. Do note I actually drive when I go to work, which is about once a week these days. That's simply because I can, and then can leave public transport lesser occupied for those who can't.

I long for this to end. When I can take public transport, I have 2h of reasonably peace and quiet in which to read and write.

There is at the moment, because of the way we have chosen/permitted society to become structured.

Thirty years ago my local big supermarket was Sainsbury's and it was in the local High Street - we could and did get a single bus to shop there and could have walked it if we didn't have too much shopping to carry. Today my local big supermarket is still Sainsbury's, but is seven miles away in a retail park, it is not a single bus ride and it is not walkable even by the greatest stretch of the imagination -  I drive there. The local High Street hasn't moved but is now moribund and half dead.

My first full time programming job in the seventies I walked to and from each day, or caught the bus if the weather was awful. I haven't had a job in the last 40 years that didn't involve a minimum of 20 miles of travel each day (whether public transport or driving) and most were further.

Much has to change before we can dump the need for individuals to travel significant distances each day for the necessities of life.

Exactly this!!!

Back in school days, we would run or take the bus to the grocery store, then call for a taxi for the short ride home with all the groceries.
I cannot even remember the last time I saw a taxi on the road...
For just a couple of items, all that was needed was a backpack and a bicycle.

Nowadays, the employer chooses a stupid location that is cheap for them, and then does not allow EV charging.  It all leaves the employees with no choice (ICE vehicle), an extended commute and shouldering much higher costs.  On the way home, one now has to drive through a massive "retail park" to find the groceries. 
My guess is the cost to society is much higher this way, where the focus is on transferring the costs to someone else, rather than reducing the overall costs.

... all bits and pieces of the puzzle.  Who knows what the complete puzzle looks like?

[Specmaster]

My family laugh at me because I frequently come back yet another tool, be it a set of driver bits, sockets, cutters etc, because they say haven't you got enough already, but I often get the last laugh when they bring something to fix when I say, you remember when I brought that xyz thing you laughed at me getting? Well I just used to fix this for you, without that tool I couldn't have done it. That silences them for a bit then. 

Yup. This has been the story of my life. When I was 8, I took apart every alarm clock in the house, working or not. When I was 10, I put them all back together again. And they all worked.

mnem
Scared the f*** out of grandmomma too... she spent a week swearing I'd been possessed. Until I fixed her stove... then I was allright. 

And in the meantime, everyone was always late for everything 

[Vince]

Anyway, the test set up. Cover off the 7904 and the 7A24. It's a little awkward getting in there but workable. As I stated the bounce is intermittent and it took a while but I've pretty much nailed it down to U1550. See schematic. So I'll change that IC. I have to pull down the junker 485 and see if it has the same P/N IC. Like the 7A26 it is S/N dependent. If it's an older S/N and the wrong P/N there are a bunch of beat to crap and somewhat cheap 7A24's on Ebay. But I'll have to ask the seller the S/N first before ordering. 

Med I can't see squat on your schematic, too damn small ! 

[tggzzz]

ALSO... in English you say (normally)  " a 10 year old kid (for example) "    NOT a 10 yearSSS old kid ", that had me baffled at first ! 

ALSO you  have words that are are SPELT the same but that are not SPOKEN the same and don't mean the same thing : LEAD for example !!   

Read, learn, and inwardly digest the examples in https://www.eevblog.com/forum/eevblab/perverse-language/msg607129/#msg607129

[Vince]

Hmmm.... this just popped up !

https://www.leboncoin.fr/outillage_materiaux_2nd_oeuvre/2032784962.htm?ac=98969919

A nice looking Tek 585A hollow-state marvel. Have one already but it suffered extreme sun damage so it will never look nice sadly.
That one OTOH looks pristine in comparison. And it also comes with another Tek anchor, a 564B. No interest in the latter but the seller sells only the complete lot. Sold as is, says they won't power up.
Price tag is not 1 Euros of course ! Seller says " the higest bid wins it all " .

For local pickup only of course, and as per my usual luck, it's at the other end of the country from me, in the far north of France ! 
So I won't get that nice 585A sadly ! 

However being so far up north, not far from Calais, means some of you in south east England might reasonably make the trip to the seller. Much closer to you than it is to me that's for sure !

So I thought I would throw it in there just in case...

[Specmaster]

Whats happened on the computing front, it wasn't all that long ago that I recall folk were looking for the kick arse AMD Ryzen CPU's towards the top end of the family, coupled with the fastest RAM modules and one of the very best graphics cards, top end MB's and either the very quietest fans for cooling and/or plenty of bling in the cases and internal lighting, oh yes and the meanest of power supplies. Now it seems that people are happy with ex corporation laptops that more than likely have been baked, running for hours on end, maybe left in cars even where the temperature could rival those found in saunas, and or possibly been clogged up insides with fluff and dust etc due to idiots using them on their laps, or even beds etc, without providing them with a hard flat surface to ensure adequate flow of cooling air both internally and also of course around the outside and beneath to wick away the heat build up 

[med6753]

Click on the pix which will take you to Image Shack. Then click again.

[bd139]

Whats happened on the computing front, it wasn't all that long ago that I recall folk were looking for the kick arse AMD Ryzen CPU's towards the top end of the family, coupled with the fastest RAM modules and one of the very best graphics cards, top end MB's and either the very quietest fans for cooling and/or plenty of bling in the cases and internal lighting, oh yes and the meanest of power supplies. Now it seems that people are happy with ex corporation laptops that more than likely have been baked, running for hours on end, maybe left in cars even where the temperature could rival those found in saunas, and or possibly been clogged up insides with fluff and dust etc due to idiots using them on their laps, or even beds etc, without providing them with a hard flat surface to ensure adequate flow of cooling air both internally and also of course around the outside and beneath to wick away the heat build up 

My laptops are both new, in warranty and are both Ryzens with 24Gb of RAM, Radeon graphics and 1TiB SSDs and they plug into my dock and instantly turn into a desktop with nice 4K monitor keyboard and mouse 

Needed my desktop specifically for games, F360 and running virtualisation workloads. Prior to that I was using a solitary i5 T470. Demand for games and F360 has now declined and I do my compute remotely for perhaps £50 a year total for which it’s not worth spending on hardware for. My use case changed basically.

As for the old stuff at 3 years it’s probably less likely to drop dead than new ones from experience. There’s a very high early failure rate of laptops and desktops in <1 year.

[Cerebus]

ALSO... in English you say (normally)  " a 10 year old kid (for example) "    NOT a 10 yearSSS old kid ", that had me baffled at first ! 

In the north of England they do it the other way around: "Ah've bin workin' at t'factory for ten year" instead of "ten years".

The "ten year old kid" example is even more perfidous, because you can also say "The kid is ten years old".

[Vince]

ALSO... in English you say (normally)  " a 10 year old kid (for example) "    NOT a 10 yearSSS old kid ", that had me baffled at first ! 

ALSO you  have words that are are SPELT the same but that are not SPOKEN the same and don't mean the same thing : LEAD for example !!   

Read, learn, and inwardly digest the examples in https://www.eevblog.com/forum/eevblab/perverse-language/msg607129/#msg607129

That's tough ! 

But had a look at the first 10 lines, doesn't look that bad at all to me.
You just need to take your time, don't rush, and it should be alright ! 
Would take an hour to do though...

[mansaxel]

Yeah, sometimes having a bit of heft to a car is a good thing as it tends to hold the car in contact with the road surface, whereas a car that is lightweight can often catch air over bumps and that will cause total braking distances to increase.

But, the laws of physics say that retarding an object is going to require force corresponding to its mass. This means that the heavier car is going to be harder to stop than the lighter one, all other things being equal. There is something to be said for adding adhesion by mass, certainly, although my pessimistic hunch is that it fast becomes a losing game.

In the braking on wet tarmac situation, it almost totally comes down to not locking the wheels, because the friction of a freely skidding wheel is, as is universally known, much lower than a wheel that has grip and rotates. Hence, the ABS implementation is the crucial part.

Even if the ladies and gentlemen from Stuttgart don't make them like they used to (the W124 is by some people described as the last "built to spec, not to a price" model), they still turn out mighty fine cars. Am not surprised that it came out in top for braking.

[Cerebus]

My guess is the cost to society is much higher this way, where the focus is on transferring the costs to someone else, rather than reducing the overall costs.

This is it. Businesses do not have to bear the cost of "externalities". If they can find a way that is cheaper/more profitable for them, and pushes some costs indirectly onto someone else they will follow that way. In a world where, at the time being, all rewards and penalties for businesses are financial we as a society cannot afford for them to continue to not have to pay the cost of externalities and get a free ride at the expense of everybody and everything else.